Google's Privacy Director Is Stepping Down

As Alma Whitten steps down, Google will get a privacy director based in Mountain View

When Alma Whitten was tapped to be Google's first director of privacy in 2010, CNet declared hers the "hardest job at Google." A long time engineer at the company with expertise in computer security, she was put in charge of a program overseeing products in development at Google to try to prevent the release of those that got privacy wrong.

Now she's giving that job up. Whitten announced internally at Google that she is stepping down from her post with plans to retire. She's remaining for a couple of months while the privacy team transitions to new leadership. Whitten, who has been overseeing privacy at Google from the company's London office, will be replaced by Lawrence You, an engineer who has been with the company for eight years, and importantly, at least from my perspective, is based in Mountain View, where much of the privacy-violating magic happens. It's certainly much closer to the Google X Lab, from whence new technologies such as Glass and driverless cars are coming, presenting novel privacy implications for review.

You has been working with Whitten and the privacy team, notably when the team oversaw the uniting of Google's 70+ privacy policies into one (which caused the Internet to freak out). You will be taking over leading the privacy component of a privacy and security team that includes several hundred people, according to Google, who report to Eric Grosse, Google's VP for Security Engineering.

Given Google's vast footprint when it comes to our day-to-day lives and personal information, the person in this position has a direct impact on the amount of privacy you have and will have in the future.

Whitten was named to the post in October 2010, months after two big privacy screw-ups by the company: Wi-Spy and Buzz. In the former, Google revealed its Street View cars had been "accidentally" engineered to suck up information from the Wi-Fi networks they drove past. Google said it'd been done by a rogue engineer. Google is still dealing with the fall-out and recently agreed to a settlement with 38 attorneys general, that included a $7 million fine, a public Wi-Fi safety campaign (that some people are already taking issue with) and an agreement to hold an annual "Privacy Week" for employees to make sure they know it's a bad idea to include secret data collection in products that will get the company in trouble around the world.

Google's hope is that a director of privacy will prevent mess-ups like this from happening. One technological area that Google appears to be holding back on for now because of privacy concerns is facial recognition to identify strangers.

“We have the technology — lots of people have the technology, and some companies are already doing it,” Whitten has said. “But we don’t know how we can build in transparency and control over it.”

“During her 10 years at Google, Alma has done so much to improve our products and protect our users," said Google in a statement. "The privacy and security teams, and everyone else at Google, will continue this hard work to ensure that our users’ data is kept safe and secure.”